Hi guys,
With this article I will try to explain how I do paint with acrylics.
In the previous post, I said I used the Andrea Khaki, well, I decided to modify the tone adding a little bit of green and ochre.
I proceed mixing a fairly large quantity of the base colour and placing it in a small plastic container with a lid, in order to keep the colour from drying.
Place the base colour in a clean pot and add a small quantity of sunny skintone and diliuite the mix around 20/30% colour and 80/70% water, basically like a wash you use to weather your tank or plane.
You can barely see the differences at this stage, but after 2 or 3 coats of the first highlight you'll start to see something.
You can also simulate wrinkles and creases with paint (see the red arrows).
Remember always paint with a really diluited colour, and clean up the paint excess from the brush on a piece of paper, you need to be able to control the paint flow.
Keep on adding the sunny skintones colour to the base colour to make lighter highlights and paint smaller areas, going towards the top of the wrinkles.
Have a look at the following two pictures, you'll see that the difference is now visible. Remember, the trick is always a really diluited colour.
Is now time to add the shadows.
I did mess up many figures at the beginning, but I've learned a couple of tricks.
First trick, diluite the shadows even more, I'm talking like 10% colour and 90% water, like a filter. The difference again will be the ability to control the paint flow, cleaning uo the excess paint on a piece of paper.
I forgot to take pictures of the first shadows, but here you can see the two tones, lighter shadow (red arrow) and darker one (white shadow) close to each other. Also use the shadow colour to make the wrinkles, adding the dark line above the light one (yellow arrow)
Simulate the stitching as well.
Once you have finished with the shadows probably (happen all the time to me) the transition between shadows and highlights looks to hard, don't worry.
Here's the second trick, diluite the base colour as a filter 90-10 ratio and apply it to the all figure.
You ca also apply a filter to selected areas that needs a more subtle transition.
If you want to give the fabrics a more used tone, use a dark, almost black tone and give a further general wash.
In this picture, you can see the weathering as well (inside the circles) using the same colour used for the mud stains painted at the botom of the trousers, still pigments to add.
Hope this make sense, let me know what you think and if I can give more suggestions.
Ciao
Gioanni
perfect SBS mate 
